Cockaigne

As a denunciation of the battery chicken industry, the artists created a video that contemplates the baroque concept of the still life, in this case featuring chickens gorging themselves in a place brimming with earthly delights (Cockaigne). In Medieval myth, Cockaigne—literally “cuckoo land”—was a place of plenty and luxury, but also of transgression and gluttony, as depicted in the elder Bruegel’s Luilekkerland (1567). Various takes reveal the cloaca—the chicken’s orifice—“staring” at the viewer. The irony is that the eggs we eat pass through that same orifice as the animal’s faeces, urine and sperm.